Beorn

Lore & Background

Beorn lives in a wooden house on his pasture-lands between the Misty Mountains and Mirkwood, to the east of the Anduin. His household includes an animal retinue (with horses, dogs, sheep, and cows); according to Gandalf, Beorn does not eat his cattle, nor hunt wild animals. He grows large areas of clover for his bees. Gandalf believes that Beorn is either a descendant of the bears who had lived in the Misty Mountains before the arrival of the giants, or a descendant of the men who had lived in the region before the arrival of the dragons or Orcs from the north. He is of immense size and strength for a man and retains these attributes in bear-form. He has black hair (in either form) and a thick black beard and broad shoulders. While not a "giant" outright, Beorn's human form is of such great size that the three and a half foot tall Bilbo judges that he could have easily walked between Beorn's legs without touching his body. When Bilbo meets him, Beorn has "great bare arms and legs with knotted muscles", and wears "a tunic of wool down to his knees." Beorn names the large rock by the River Anduin the Carrock; he had created the steps that led from its base to its flat top.

Reader's Guide

In naming his character, Tolkien used beorn, an Old English word for "man" and "warrior" (with implications of "freeman" and "nobleman" in Anglo-Saxon society). The name is cognate with the Scandinavian Björn or Bjørn, meaning bear; and the figure of Beorn can be related to the traditional Northern heroes Bödvar Bjarki and Beowulf, both of whose names also mean "bear". The name Beorn survives in the name of the Scottish town Borrowstounness, which is derived from the Old English Beornweardstun ("the town with Beorn as its guardian"). The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey comments that Beorn exemplifies the heroic Northern courage that Tolkien later made a central virtue in his larger novel, The Lord of the Rings, as he is ferocious, rude, and cheerful, characteristics that reflect his huge inner self-confidence. Paul W. Lewis, writing in Mythlore, calls Beorn "essentially a berserker in battle", alluding to the Old Norse warriors who fought in a trance-like state of fury. The term means "bear-shirt"; its Old Norse form, hamrammr, was taken by Tolkien to mean "skin-changer", and he gave Beorn this capability. Beorn's name for the large rock in the River Anduin, the Carrock, on the other hand, is not Germanic – whether Norse or English – but Brittonic, related to Welsh carreg, "a stone". The medievalist Marjorie Burns notes the tension between "British" and Norse in Tolkien's handling of his materials. This is one of many instances of what Clyde S. Kilby called "contrasistency" – Tolkien's apparently intentional "doubleness" or switching between opposite viewpoints. Burns comments that Beorn's story and character embody tensions "between forest and garden, home and wayside, comradeship and solitude, risk and security" and in her view most strongly between "freedom and obligation", not to mention bear and man. Burns calls Beorn one of "the most striking of Tolkien's individuals ... his innate, one-of-a-kind loners, the honorable isolationists, who dwell in secluded domains and ... are distinctive, free, self-reliant but respectful of other lives and hostile only to those deserving hostility." The Tolkien scholar Justin Noetzel compares Beorn to Tom Bombadil in The Lord of the Rings, another one-of-a-kind figure strongly attached to the place where he lives. Both have "an intimate connection with the natural world", using this to help their visitors, protecting them from local dangers, whether wolves and goblins, or Old Man Willow and the Barrow-wight. Burns writes that Beorn's character, too, contains a complex tension between Norse and English. As a skin-changer he is evidently pagan and Norse; but his vegetarianism, reluctance to use metal, home-loving nature and flower garden all look more compatible with Christianity and Englishness, without being those things specifically. Burns comments that he is thus "in the best Tolkienian tradition, a being of two extremes: both ruthless and kind, a bear and man, a homebody and wanderer, a berserker and pacifist in one." Burns states that this blending of wild Norse with civilised English can be seen in Middle English literature such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Gawain meets a big rugged Beorn-like shape-changer, Bertilak (the Green Knight), who lives in a castle in an oak forest, and speaks with Christian courtesy. She calls Sir Gawain's oaks "entirely druidic", suggesting Celtic mythology or Arthurian legend. But she notes that "the oak was sacred to [the Norse god] Thor", allowing Tolkien to assemble Celtic and Norse elements in his composite Middle-earth. Further, she writes, Beorn's home has an almost diagrammatic set of circles of "mixed English and Nordic characteristics": at the centre the Nordic hall; the "Shire-like flower garden" and courtyard; a wider yard (Norse gaard) with its outbuildings; a "high thorn-hedge" in English style; a "belt of tall and very ancient oaks" (English or Norse) and fields of flowers; little English-like hills and valleys with oaks and elms; "wide grass-lands, and a river running through it all", which remind Burns of Iceland; and finally "the mountains", evidently Norse.

Did You Know?

• Beorn kills the Goblin leader Bolg and his bodyguards in bear form at the Battle of Five Armies.
• The Beornings assist Aragorn in taking Gollum to Mirkwood before the War of the Ring.